"RMO", mentioned in the previous post, is "rec.music.opera", a Usenet newsgroup devoted to discussion of opera. I became a regular visitor almost as soon as I was on the Internet. (Google's archive shows my earliest post there in November 1996.) About five years ago my interest in opera began to wane, and it has continued to do so to the point where now it's nearly zero. Lately it seems to me that interesting off-topic discussions are dwindling, but I'm not sure if that's a measure of the group's decline or just me being out of touch. In recent years I've taken long leaves from the group, but I still return from time to time out of habit.

Like any Usenet group, RMO has its share (a bit more than its share, even) of bitter and nasty feuding, as well as some dimwits whose prolific posts test any reader's capacity to suffer fools gladly. In spite of that, and in spite of the loss through attrition of some of my favorite participants, it's still a place with at least a dozen thoughtful and interesting people — some of whom I now consider my friends (including Paul and REG). That's what keeps bringing me back.

One recurring off-topic topic on RMO is Israel. Among the articulate regulars are several passionate defenders of Israel and a few equally passionate detractors. Me, I'm more or less agnostic on the question, so I usually stay out, but in the last go-round I happened to say something to REG, which prompted this email from Paul:

Me

Thanks, Paul. With so many cliquish and partisan blogs out there, it warms my heart to have correspondents with whom I can thoroughly disagree on major issues but still enjoy talking with.

I can't speak for the French. As for me, your characterization of my isolationist attitude is close but not quite right. For me, a non-interventionist foreign policy is directly related to individual liberties, respecting the opinions of others even when they're dead wrong about politics, religion, morals, or what-have-you. This sort of tolerance is also commonly misunderstood, in spite of the fact that it's right there in the word. When you choose to "tolerate" opposing views, it doesn't mean — as detractors falsely imply — that you think the other views are just as valid as your own. In fact, you can even think they are horribly wrong. By choosing to tolerate others, you are just acknowledging that no matter how wrong they may be, they are just as attached to their views as you are to yours, and to try to punish them for their error or convert them to your point of view is futile and will do more harm than good. Better to just let them be and try to get along as well best you can.

That is the logic of tolerance, and for me it is the key to 19th century British liberal political thought. It's not an idealistic logic, it's a practical one.

The same applies to foreign intervention. You mention that you feel we should be a force for good in the world. I don't disagree with you there. But from that same starting place, I ask, "Given all the evil that's out there, what is the most effective way to promote good?" The temptation is to want to go out and fix it. The lesson of history, I believe, is that any such meddling in foreign affairs, no matter how worthy the goal, is likely to result in more harm than help. Once you tot up all the deaths, the economic cost, the blowback against your nation for being aggressive, the unforeseen adverse consequences of destabilizing the status quo, and the inability of plain force to solve the problem anyway, you end up with a negative balance.

Again, to accept this doesn't require learning to love bad regimes, nor even to allow that it's OK for bad regimes to exist. It only requires seeing that as much as we'd like to make them go away, we can't reasonably expect to do so without making things worse.

Of course, the lessons of history are never really clear. Because we have only one history, there's no control group to make the experiment scientific. Whether we choose to intervene or not, no one can ever really know how it would have turned out had we done the opposite. If I point to the disaster in Iraq and say we should have stayed out, you might say that things would have been even worse if we had. Likewise, if you point to the disaster in Rwanda and say we should have done something to stop it, I might reply that we only would have made things worse. Neither of us can truly prove our case.

My position is not absolute. If it is admirably consistent that's only because it assumes you can't know enough to know which interventions will be the exception to the rule. I don't believe it's true that military intervention is never good. It's just that since you generally don't know beforehand which ones will be the good ones (and to some extent you don't even know afterward), the wisest policy is to avoid them all.

As your recognize, my opposition to military intervention abroad ends when our own country's direct interests are involved. This too is not so much a moral distinction as a practical one. America does have interests and it's not wrong to pursue them. I just think we have a really bad record of estimating how effective foreign intervention, and especially military intervention, will be. In order to learn from these mistakes, we ought to have a much much higher standard of interest before deciding it warrants throwing our muscle around internationally.

I think — and presumably this is why my view is a minority one, in America at least — that hindsight tends to view intervention as "successful" more often than the record warrants. We look at all the foreign wars that we won and say it worked out OK, without really seeing what we might have done instead, and we narrow our focus on the conflict at hand so as not to see the other problems we created as a result. A good example, which we touched on a bit in RMO, is World War I. American intervention there is generally perceived as successful, even to the point where it's sometimes given as an example of why we should intervene. Longtime readers know of my very low opinion on Woodrow Wilson, and I think this national whitewashing of our participation in World War I has a lot to do with why Wilson is by far our most overrated president. Our intervention in World War I was disastrous, and it directly related to the horrors that followed in the next generation.

I cite this only as an example of why I think American military intervention fails even though the mainstream view of history says it succeeded. Put simply, I think the mainstream view is national myth. I don't intend to argue the case against our intervention in World War I here today. Instead, I'll leave it to someone who is generally well respected by you interventionist types. This is Winston Churchill, speaking in 1936 in an interview in the New York Enquirer.

(In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that later, when he was prime minister and we were again at war with Germany, Churchill disclaimed those words and maintained he never said them. Given the situation Britain was in, I think that's understandable. Also understandable, but more distasteful, is that when the publisher of the interview, miffed at having his own reputation and honesty thus questioned, called Churchill a liar, he was indicted by the U.S. government for "conspiring to lower the morale of the armed forces of this country". A few years later, with the war settled, the whole sorry matter was dropped by everyone involved.)

7:28:45 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

(The title is a very old reference. I'm not sure even my old Dipdom readers will recognize it.)

Earlier this week we had a few welcome days of "Seattle weather" -- cool and drizzly -- but now it's back to hot and sunny one last time. Or at least I hope it's the last.

I've generally thought of myself as one who dislikes hot weather, but my personal revelation during one of the heat waves earlier this year was just the opposite. Compared to the people in my life closest to me, I tolerate the heat much better. Both my wife and my mother become miserable at about 80 degrees. For either of them, the longer she spends in the heat, the more irritable she becomes, reaching total meltdown at about two hours.

My sister, like me, dislikes the sun more than the heat. I'm not sure I really mind the heat per se at all. Like any normal person, I don't want to be truly overheated, but I don't particularly mind baking in a hot car for a half hour or so. What I hate is the sun. I hate being out in it, and if I do have to be out in it, I'd still rather swelter in layers of clothes than be exposed to it directly. I can't stand this day after day of bright sun and cloudless sky. It's one of the main reasons I moved to Seattle.

I say "Seattle", but after our last move we're now in Shoreline. It's the first time in 14 years that my home address doesn't include a city with a major-league sports team named after it. I'm not sure what the proper procedure is for telling out-of-towners where I live. If I say I live "in Seattle" that's not strictly accurate, but if I say "Shoreline" no one from outside the area knows where it is. (In fact, it's just the next town up, immediately to the north.) The same question arose with the wedding. I told some of my out-of-state friends that we were married in Seattle, but in fact the wedding took place in Medina.

Medina is a little enclave town with a six-figure median income (topped off by Bill Gates) on the other side of Lake Washington, a large lake that runs north-south paralleling the coast about five miles inland. I'm told that Medina was originally named for the city in Arabia, which is spelled the same but pronounced differently. The one here rhymes with the capital of Saskatchewan.

Shoreline is one of the state's newest cities. It was incorporated only in 1995, gathering together about nine smaller communities which escaped Seattle's northward expansion, along with the urban residential that has filled up between them. I'm not sure how it was nine years ago, but today you'd barely notice the difference crossing the border from Seattle to not-Seattle. Not that there isn't a difference as you go north from central Seattle. You'll see it become less dense and more forested, but the change is gradual.

The name "Shoreline" derives not from any actual shoreline, but rather from two shores and two lines. The idea was that Shoreline occupied a rectangle bounded by lines on the north and south (the King County line and Seattle city line respectively), and by shores on the east and west (Lake Washington and Puget Sound). The east side of the rectangle is conceptual but not actual. For one thing, Lake Washington doesn't extend all the way to the county line. Besides that, even the part of the shore that does extend north of the city line is not part of Shoreline; it is belongs to the city of Lake Forest Park. Thus Shoreline's eastern border is no shore at all, but an irregular wiggle through the neighborhoods separating Shoreline from Lake Forest Park.

Our recent move to Shoreline continues my northward migration and brings me within walking distance of my favorite library. Just in time, as it turns out. Starting in October, residents of Seattle will no longer be allowed to place holds on books in the King County Library System. This change is an indirect budget cut on the part of the Seattle Public Library. In population, Seattle makes up about one-third of King County. KCLS covers all of the county except Seattle. SPL and KCLS have a reciprocal agreement whereby residents of either's territory have full borrowing privileges in the other. As part of the agreement, usage is tracked and whichever library's natives borrow abroad more must subsidize the other library accordingly.

Given that KCLS is the much superior library, it is no surprise to me that Seattle residents use KCLS much more than Seattle non-resident use SPL, so all these years SPL has been paying KCLS. With the latest evaluation and pricing, the subsidy has become too large for SPL to afford without jeopardizing its home budget. Something had to be done. The decision was that Seattle residents can still borrow from KCLS branches, but they will no longer be allowed to place a hold online and have a book sent to their favorite branch for pickup. That's exactly what I used to do all the time, and no doubt what thousands of other Seattle residents do regularly, so it's one reason I'm glad to have moved north of the city line.

5:15:52 AM  [permalink]  comment []